Wednesday, 20 May 2020

Has a second patient been cured of HIV?

A study of the second
HIV patient to undergo successful stem cell transplantation from donors with a HIV-resistant
gene, finds that there was no active viral infection in the patient's blood 30
months after they stopped anti-retroviral therapy, according to a case report
published in The Lancet HIV journal and presented at CROI (Conference on
Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections).

Although there was no
active viral infection in the patient's body, remnants of integrated HIV-1 DNA
remained in tissue samples, which were also found in the first patient to be
cured of HIV. The authors suggest that these can be regarded as so-called
'fossils', as they are unlikely to be capable of reproducing the virus.

Lead author on the
study, Professor Ravindra Kumar Gupta, University of Cambridge, UK, says:
"We propose that these results represent the second ever case of a patient
to be cured of HIV. Our findings show that the success of stem cell
transplantation as a cure for HIV, first reported nine years ago in the Berlin
patient, can be replicated."

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He cautions: "It
is important to note that this curative treatment is high-risk, and only used
as a last resort for patients with HIV who also have life-threatening
haematological malignancies. Therefore, this is not a treatment that would be
offered widely to patients with HIV who are on successful antiretroviral
treatment.

While most HIV
patients can manage the virus with current treatment options and have the
possibility of living a long and healthy life, experimental research of this
kind following patients who have undergone high-risk, last-resort curative
treatments, can provide insight into how a more widely applicable cure might be
developed in the future.